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VLC Media Player Tutorial #10 - How to Play ISO Files

As far as I can remember, VLC Media Player has been my favorite multimedia player no matter which operating system I was running in my computer, Windows XP, Vista, 7 and I even have it in my Ubuntu machine. The reasons for this are not few, just to name some of them, the wide variety of formats it supports, the powerful streaming options, speed, low resources consumption, besides being open source and multiplatform. But what it makes this outstanding piece of freeware so special is its capacity to play image files in the ISO format, and that is exactly what I'm going to tell you about in this tutorial, how to open and playback video directly from an ISO disc image.

What is necessary to be able to follow this tutorial besides having a CD or DVD disc image in the ISO format allocated in your hard drive, is to have VLC Media Player installed and running in your PC. If you haven't already tried this magnificent free media player you can download it from this page by clicking on the big blue “Download” button above, once you get the installer, run it and InstallIQ™ will take care of the rest. You can also read our review, news and tutorials about VLC Media Player.

OK, let's say that you like to protect your treasured DVD's from the wear and tear and you decide to use some disc image creation software to create a disc image, but now you face the dilemma of how to playback your DVD's without the hassle of having a disc image mounting program. Well, fortunately, it's really easy, all you have to do is to launch VLC Media Player and go to Media > Open File...

A browser-like dialog will open where you can select the ISO image you want to open.

Click on the “Open” button and the movie will start playing right away.

Another way to open not only ISO images but any other media file is to open a Windows Explorer window and drag the file into the VLC Media Player interface.

And a third way would be to make VLC your default program to open ISO files by right clicking on the ISO image and selecting Open with... > Choose default program.

In the dialog click on More programs if it does not appear in the first instance and select VLC from the list. If you want VLC to always open ISO files then check the corresponding check box which is under the programs list.

Final Words

As you can see opening and playing movies stored in disc images in the ISO format is dead easy with VLC Media Player and you have a bunch of options to do it, thus VLC is an extraordinary free media player that really deserves a place among my favorite pieces of freeware. Download VLC Media Player right now by clicking on the “Download Now” link you can find below and start playing all your ISO image of you favorite DVD or CD movies.

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